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Invocation of my demon brother

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Zachary Lazar’s second novel, ‘Sway’ (Little, Brown: 260 pp., $23.99), which Mark Rozzo reviews in this Sunday’s Book Review, interweaves three iconic stories--the rise of the Rolling Stones from 1962 through Altamont; the long, strange trip of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the sorry saga of Charles Manson associate (and convicted killer) Bobby Beausoleil--to get at the dark side of the 1960s, the moment when the Age of Aquarius imploded into Luciferian light.

It’s an odd book, all glittery surfaces and collapsing possibilities, but what may be strangest is that it involves so much history we can actually see. As I read ‘Sway,’ I kept using the Internet as an enhancement, a way to make some pieces of the story come alive.

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After finishing Lazar’s account of Anger’s 1947 film, ‘Fireworks,’ I looked the movie up on YouTube and watched it for myself. I did the same with ‘Scorpio Rising,’ the 1964 biker film that made Anger a minor celebrity when it was banned in California.

As for Beausoleil, I discovered that he’s still in prison, where he makes art and music, which he sells on a website that offers only glancing reference to his role in the 1969 Manson-directed murder of music teacher Gary Hinman. (‘During the commission of an absurdly misconceived drugs transaction, things went terribly wrong, and BeauSoleil killed a man.’)

Then, of course, there are the Stones. We all know what they look like, but even 38 years later, it’s shocking to watch violence explode as they play ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ at Altamont, as if they’ve invoked a force they couldn’t control.

This is the point of Lazar’s novel, that the 1960s were a time in which all sorts of children (the Stones, Anger and Beausoleil among them) got involved with things they didn’t understand. It’s also the idea behind Anger’s film ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother,’ which suggests that every invocation is followed by an evocation, desire become action and then unleashed upon the world.

That’s a fascinating concept, but ‘Sway’ also raises a number of wholly contemporary questions about the way literature (or, for that matter, history) operates in our own digitized and archived time. Does it enhance or diffuse the power of Lazar’s novel to read it in conjunction with the computer, to look up and literally watch many of its scenes? What does it mean for memory, for reading, for our own power as writers and readers to invoke and then evoke a shared fictional dream?

I don’t know the answers to those questions; it’s just that I’ve never read a book in quite this way before.

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David L. Ulin

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